Sunday, April 17, 2011

Process of a Song...


It never ceases to amaze me the various processes a song takes. Sometimes it’s generated from a thought, a comment, or a feeling. Sometimes the melody or music comes first. Sometimes you get an idea and work and work and never seem to get a fix on it, so it stays in a drawer, or in a file, or on a scrap of paper, and sometime down the road, a week a month, a year or more later, just maybe something will click, and there it is. Something more than an essence. Something with meat and flavor and heartiness. Something you can ‘sink your teeth” into.
This winter, while recording new and older songs, some to publish, some to archive, some just for fun, this process again, surprised me. One of the older pieces, that never really felt quite right, haunted me. I’ve always liked the lyrics, and the feel, and that aspect has been polished and shaved until it seemed pretty refined, but the sound never really felt right. I tried a country feel, a two-step beat, a folk style, and nothing ever clicked. During a recording session, a dropped to a Latin feel in a relative minor, and something started to change. It still wasn’t quite right, … but… there was something there, very promising. The next morning I awoke with a different thought on what to do with this song, and when I picked up the guitar, there it was. By doing the arrangement in a more Bossanova style, the whole thing finally clicked. Now, having performed this song a couple of times publicly, I’m getting feedback from others on how they really like the song. I’m happy to say it will now be more readily available at performances and will be published this fall in a Non-blues CD. Start listening for “Clear Blue eyes”.